Shock- The Art of Shadowtemptation
by hazard317
Summary: Shadowshock's mission. Target- Tony Stark Duration- unknown
1. Prologue

The Untitled Prologue

.

It's a craft, it's an art. It's a merchant's tool, a bargain, it's a theory, it's a mask.

**It's a weapon.**

It's the trap and the bait.

It's acidic. It burns. It freezes. **It borders radioactive. It spills past toxic.**

It's terrible nausea, **it's delirium.**

It infects.

Compromises.

Kills.

It is gentle

parasitic

** insanity.**


	2. Chapter 1- Blinded

Blinded

First Chapter

The sign is flawlessly crafted, elegantly shaped, welcoming, even cleverly alluring, but it is distinctly grotesque in the most painful way. For the way that it beams, pure white, radiant with searing sunlight, it is a distinctly grotesque sign.

I, sadly, cannot examine its letters so critically, as I had wished. Mere seconds of skimming are all my eyes can stand of that blinding blank. A refuge of dark lettering lounging in the pain. I can take it.

I'll have to take much worse.

**_STARK INDUSTRIES_**

**_CHANGING THE WORLD FOR A BETTER FUTURE_**

"Pain.." I hiss the word, releasing myself from the light-for, you see, when I am burned, all is burned. Mind, eyes, skin. Shadow.

"All just another part of the missions, is it?" I spit the words, exhaling contempt, in my way, the last taste of carefree contempt for… well. It could be years, couldn't it.

It could be centuries.

…

I suppose I'll leave the sign and its tiny words, the warnings I'm too blind to see.

And, as I walk, as I secure the soft-purple-black shrug on my sharp and slim shoulders (you see, I've always smiled at that area of myself, the gentle neck, the blades, the smooth joining of both), I shall introduce myself.

In my way.

I approach the glossy buildings. It is a complex place, a maze, a place we've been unsuccessful in breaching. Just like its owner. My target.

I can assure you that success is dangerously near.

Mm, yes, introductions.

"Hello, love. If you could direct me to a certain office, well," I laugh lightly, lowering my narrow stare from the clear and shaded skyscrapers to the scientist who had paused to shift a folder in his fingers (or so I thought, then, for my disguise does seem to attract a terrible amount of masculine attention), "I'd remember you as the first kind hearted creature I've yet met in this industry."

He blinked, just blinked at first, then a quick, stressed smile. Emotions of disarray, and surprise at the rare blessing of a sweet (and pretty) intern, no doubt the first bit of light in his morning.

"I'd only be doing the correct thing, miss, what office would it be?" His voice is bashful, head _so _slightly tilted, the way they all are.

Just keep your smile, keep your lips dark and pursed over the contempt. Let it begin. The role. The game.

"Interns, initiation, interviews, love? For the newest recruits?"

The little bashful voice grows cheerier, excited, as he stretches a thin arm out, a gesture of direction.

"Along the fountains, there'll be the elevator that can take you to third floor, with the Staff Conference Room. They're being held, internships I mean, in the Room this week… Unless he's taken the space again…"

_He. _My eyes, promptly racing from the fountain path to his face, betray me. I manage, just manage, to wrestle the calculation in my mind back to its mission-ready dormancy and he turns back to a perfect, perfect young businesswoman.

"Oh, it sounds just right, love-"

A breathless interruption, a breathless grin, and the flustered man spoke again.

"Miss, just so you can remember if you need anything, I'm Sheldon Riggs, Lab Study Team 7…"

It is apparent I already have a connection in Stark Industries. I nod, taking delicate, backwards half-steps towards the bubbling fountains.

"I can remember, love."

I swivel on my dark heels and begin my long stride, breathing in the business, the undercurrents, all of the electricity of the world I've entered.

"Can't remember your name if you haven't told me, miss!" He has the folder nervously clutched in both hands now.

I pause. Just pause at first.

"The role, the game, it needs a name…" I whisper to the walls and their cargo.

The click of my steps is brisk, clear, disappearing into the whitewater of science. Fitting in perfectly. Flawlessly crafted.

"Vixen, love. Just Vixen."

And the female fox disappears.

Thousands of them. Miniscule, buzzing, rushing, pounding through an instant to live. Churned and crushed into a thousand more. Water dies a countless amount of deaths in a second. A dead and frantic element. So complex.

So complex is the fountain.

I sidle along the unblemished path of pale blue, rippling with darker shades as the bubbles live for their respected instants in the light. Swathed in the orbits of the fountains' forces is a parallel line, a mirrored image, to the humans that drag their own paths along the marble of Earth. Water, just as a man, claws itself into a bright oblivion, with a purpose that is quickly lost in the tides and an impact that is swiftly drowned in sleep. Endlessly recycled, never s_taying _in slumber. It can drown and destroy, and… just as a man…

It can be _poisoned_.

Ah, me, little me, just a dark droplet of soundless, tasteless venom, coursing through Stark Industries. Through its elevators…

Through its halls…

Through its heart.

I am alone in the elevator. Little coals of ruddy yellow highlight the path my fingertips traced along the buttons. Disembark on floor three. Let the machine continue to floor five. Confuse the trail.

Just so no suspicions could catch such a quick ride to an easily found destination. Foxes always cover their tracks.

The clear chirp sounds and the doors slip aside to reveal more clean and spotless glow. Halls, stacked and stacked, wrapped in a shell of gloss, the tower that will be mine.

I breathe, but feel nothing in my empty lungs.

What did I expect? To escape this?

And so, no such treasonous opportunity presented, I click into the skyscraper's veins.

Strands of goldish hair slither along my neck when I turn to investigate the doors. A sneer violently snakes along my lips and narrowed eyelids. The entire place is as unforgivingly pure as its sign.

Staff Quarters 89: Design-Report-Communications

The room it sheaths is glazed with colors, creamy with appearance, rotten with deception. The room he sent his reputation from. I roll my eyes, amused, moving on.

Staff Quarters 90: Report-Files-Logs

I lick my glimmering lips with a mild interest.

Staff Quarters 91: Conference-Updates

Ah, how fitting, how predictably adorable. Third room on the Third floor.

I gingerly part the door from its frame and peer into a (thank GOD) dim room.

Creeping in and raising my neck, my chest, slowly assuming the scrutinized and pruned posture I have developed, I decide that the Conference Quarter is fairly vast. The faint, ghostly-pale echoes of decisions, speeches, risky exaggerations and lies play along the rounded, domed walls in a stale current. A whirlpool. Unstable and bound to swallow someone soon.

And then there are the great splinters, charred cracks that wind along the sphere of a room. Like tiny rivers of darkness. Like dead veins.

I know the voice is coming. I heard his steps. When his greeting sounds in the empty room I quickly attach his tone, his pitch, his stress on the syllables, to a memory in it- he is a teacher, a tour guide, once a scientist in this industry, now a being solely present to answer questions in that sad and patient voice.

Yes, sentences spoken tell me more than just their _content_.

Shadow knows the ways of time and memory.

And Inatimance.

"I am sincerely sorry, miss, I didn't hear you arrive. Very good- not being late, I mean…" I have my eyes fixed on the burns.

"I see there was a demonstration…" I pause to curl one fingertip along the dry wall. "Recently. Quite. Yesterday. Makes sense…" The last words are quiet.

I sweep around to face a nodding ex-scientist, perhaps four to five years older than Vixen is. Thirty-five or barely forty. Still scheming and wishing and regretting.

I chuckle inaudibly as he perches in one of the vacant, perhaps ghostly, seats of the Conference Quarters. There is still a useless hope in his useless mind. Humans.

"Time _is_ always important here, Vixen." His watch is black and gold, but a stale remnant of his well-paid past. "But we'd best be discussing your future, not our past." His smile is practiced, but a trick he learned in the crowds he used to govern. "And you'd best be directing your attention to my questions, much more your concern than a failed experiment."

_Now_ there is something new. I wear my own dark-red simper when I tilt the opposite chair to fit me and cross my legs within its plush, all the while observing his underlying amusement. Failed experiment. He refers to his own superior. He refers to my target.

"Mr. Strickland." My lips stretch wider. "I'm sure you're thinking of failures more than I am right now. Perhaps you think of the choices made that I, being new, can't even imagine yet. Perhaps this is _all_ you think whenever you enter this building. I do believe that's a warning against the boss that is soon to be mine. Against an industry that is scorched by a sort of recklessness. Is that what it is we work for? You'll forgive me for having questions of my own, sir, because I can help you to solve such things. It's why I'm here, sir." I am leaning against the glassy table now, elbows stinging from its edge.

I don't truly speak of Stark Industries.

I speak of the world.

Strickland is intrigued, anyhow. That was the plan. This is the beginning. There is no better entryway to this place than through the heart of a jealous employee.

"That answers a lot of questions, Miss Vixen." He breaks a brief silence with careful, quiet words. The smile is careful as well. But it is genuine now.

Because this is the beginning.


	3. Chapter 2- Taking Up Residence

Taking Up Residence

Second Chapter

I don't look back at the Tower…

For I am studying the papers Mr. Strickland was convinced so easily to slide towards me from across a polished table. The snaps of crimson heels echo behind me. The crimson car opens silently at the light tug on its door. The crimson sun has it heated inside, scalding the black seats for hours, but I can never feel it again.

I kick my shoes into the corner, next to my camera, on the vacant passenger's side and ready my flawlessly-decorated crimson toes on the pedals. The Tower retreats and the road rushes in viciously from gaping windows.

My residence was chosen for its proximity to the company. I, however, accepted it for its view.

My ride and I slip down the crowded highways, winds increasing with the city's speed. My hair starts to wriggle out of my tight ponytail. All the inches, all the years. Years of service.

I slow slightly to reach into a silver-ribboned, brown-underneath chocolate supply. Dove. The best. The most professional and silky sustenance. I spear one, strawberry caramel oozing onto my skin, and suck it off of the claw. Both hands back on the wheel, now. Concentrate lightly.

The apartment. I have the second-to-the-top little room, windows symmetrically decorated by ember-hued glass shapes.

The singsong engine whirs into abrupt and smooth silence as I delightedly finish edging the Lamborghini into the third best parking spot. The door glides upwards and open. I stretch my legs breezily into the open air, set my heels on the charred pavement, and stepped, pressing the door gently back into place. The papers crinkle a bit in my fingers. At the apartments' rounded doors, I pause in a moment of second thoughts. I hurry back to the car, reaching in a final time to seize my camera from its corner. The chocolates are safe in their shadows.

I soundlessly pass through the lobby, with its inferno of money matters and promises, and sweep my thin skirts onto the stairways.

I always choose the stairs. They spiral into creamy loops and flowers and wispy clichés that I quite admire. I smile and lift the Canon Powershot to capture it for the eleventh time at a new angle.

"They make the building lovelier, huh," a soft woman's voice wonderingly commented from my behind my shoulder. I turned so she could step beside me and we could stand together, gazing.

"I enjoy the way the protrusions cast darkness. A metaphorical world of divine and mirroring black-against-cream. I always take the stairs," I answer, nodding contentedly, and then my lips curve like the letters of _farewell_.

The flights twist all the way to the dark landing I call "my temporary residence". It will never be home, but I love everything about it nonetheless. A personalized plaque reads _Miss Vixen_ in elaborate letters.

I have to jerk the gold-maroon door fairly mercilessly to enter, but it's a small price to pay to be able to breeze into the beautiful rooms

Arcs of windows loop ecstatically around the circular walls, reaching up to the faraway ceiling and back to the gleaming floors. The light is filtered through dark red, buttery yellow, and tangerine curtains, and the whole gorgeous place is lit by the threads of a gorgeous fire. Essentially, direct and painful brightness is transformed into a frothy coating of color. A dangerous heaven. A shell of pyromania.

"Mm…" I kick off the spiked shoes and dance among the stained-glass-shadows. "Why don't I seal the deal, Pree?"

Short for Pretentious.

Pree blinks, and it makes her magnificent, because for the split seconds in which they shudder back open, her eyes are black holes surrounded by pools of optical, molten gold. It makes her magnificent because she is saying yes.

She is a Black Capped Lory, defected in her lack of rainbow colors, bearing only patterns of red velvet and deep, dark, infinity-shaded black. Lodged high in the textured ceiling, she watches a crimson-cloaked fire-Tempter smooth out some papers, perch in a flicker-patterned chair, and plunge into something dangerous.

I cross my legs at the ankle delicately, see-through sock feet pointed and resting on the paneled coffee table. I don't drink coffee. Cups of weakness. False energy that I have enough of.

Names, numbers. Names, numbers. Paragraphs. Numbers. Names. Numbers. Signature.

I know all the right things, all the right words, all the right codes to infiltrate an industry.

I sigh inaudibly. Rattling the pens in my makeshift pencil jar (consisting of a hollowed candle), I formulate, I craft.

Ooh, a glittery silver and bloodstain calligraphy utensil. Perfect.

My name is Vixen.

_Of course it isn't, dear. Your name is Shock._

I am 32.

_That just seems ridiculous, my darling, you are eons more. Eons more._

Why, yes, I DO have experience with weaponry.

_I could never argue that._

I can produce 16 different recommendations from 16 different prosperous companies.

_But, darling, you took those from 16 of your sisters' targets. You produce nothing._

I've previously studied deception, poisons, toxins, pyro-mechanics, arson cases, neurologic impulse, fear and its creation, wars and their creation, terrorism, and robotics. Also photography.

_You didn't need to study those things, dearest self. You knew them. You knew._

I am American.

_Liar._

I expect that my employment will be of extreme aid to Stark Industries.

_You are just __**so**__ twisted._

I can offer organization. I can offer secrets. I can offer coverups and gloss and character and expressionlessness, science and ideas and design and artistry and strategy. I have studied fear and its creation. I have studied how to avoid an ugly death.

_But you want to see an ugly death, don't you. You want perfection. You want to cleanse. You, darling, my darling, you offer lovely destruction._

My name is Vixen. I am an artist.

_Your name is Shock. You are a ShadowTempter._

I hold out a flat, elegant hand for Pree to flutter down on. She nips at a strand of my light hair. Obliging, in a way, I lean towards her soft head, eyes downcast, and whisper,

"Shall we try again, Pretentious, my love?"

She is motionless in my fingers.

"Fetch the chemicals."

Another instant of stillness… and…

Pree launches into the wide arcs of the rooms, rapidly searching, running small, live eyes along the corners, the windows, the chandeliers, the tables, islands, counters, oh, what does she see?

Only the vibrant orange she was trained to.

The streak of color that binds a precious bottle, reserved for those with a FireTaste, heavy with the almost-new, almost-untouched, completely unadulterated Restraint. It stands, innocent, otherwise unmarked, on the tip of an abandoned medicine cabinet.

Her frail claws close around the cylinder. She rises again, circles once above me. She sinks back onto my hand.

"Oh, Pree, fabulously executed, positively fabulous!" I laugh. "Drop it."

She opens her claws, carefully letting the prize slip into my own. Satisfied, I pocket it and stroke her plumes.

"Just fabulous."

Together, we trundle up the spiral stairs of fire-washed cream.

The papers? They are stacked, full of lies, by the door.

_Tenants of the building She resided in were interviewed directly after Her departure._

_ Lillian G. Falter- "I had spoken with Her about a year back, I suppose that's when it all starts, and she just, she told me she liked the darkness in the stairs. Should I have known?"_

_ The building has been shut down and "confiscated" by investigators. Tenants were each given a sum of money for new homes. Some were paid extra for their silence and most were paid extra to forget about the building._

_ Her room is currently being combed. Only a few papers, filled out with the facts of an alias that has never existed, have been recovered from the remains left by Her departure._


End file.
